In the current economic climate speech and language therapy services are suffering. Speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) have an enormous and lifelong impact on children, yet SLT is not seen as an acute service, and therefore it’s one that is being subjected to cuts. In January for example, Southwark PCT made one third of its SLT staff redundant, blaming financial reasons.
Last summer we asked primary school SENCOs about the services their pupils with SLCN are able to access, and how they are changing in the face of financial pressures. The picture that respondents painted was disheartening, with horror stories telling of strict limits on the number of referrals that could be made, 18-month waiting lists for assessment in several areas, and no replacements made available for therapists leaving their roles. If a school is told it can only refer 2 children to the local SLT department in an academic year, what should they tell the parents of a third child with needs?
We need to change the way we think about SLCN. Communication is such a crucial aspect of all our lives, and yet it’s not given the importance it merits. SLCN are the most prevalent documented SEN in primary school-aged children in this country. We need to stop thinking that savings can be made with cuts now, and start thinking about the bigger picture and how savings can be made in the future.
Not enough thought is being given to the alternative to short-term cuts. Despite clear and growing evidence about the benefits of early intervention and addressing SLCN effectively, we still focus our efforts on immediate savings without sufficient regard for the consequences of such actions in the future. This is particularly disappointing given that we have a Prime Minister with direct experience of the difficulty in accessing, and positive benefits of, speech and language therapy. On the other side of the bench in Westminster, Ed Balls MP, Shadow Chancellor, has forged a very successful and public career despite his own communication difficulties as a child. Many other MPs have familial or personal experience of how crucial speech and language therapy can be to the life of a child.
The Speech Bubble is in contact with several MPs and a member of the House of Lords; the political will to enact change is there, and what we need is to turn that will into more substantial action from those in power. There is so much evidence detailing the irrefutable importance of better meeting the SLCN of our children, but particularly in the current economic climate there are few signs of anything changing. Perhaps when the Government’s Green Paper on SEN is finally published, we will have more idea about how the coalition plans to tackle such issues. Yet cases such as Southwark’s show that we are still not thinking correctly about this issue.
It’s clear to us that addressing rather than marginalising this issue would actually save resources, if only our the Secretaries of State for Education, Health, and Mr Cameron himself would consider the wider picture. Effective SLT services would realise a plethora of financial savings. Some of them include:
- Substantial reductions in youth offending and associated costs, which are estimated to be over £4 billion annually
- The Audit Commission estimates that over £110,000 can be saved by appropriate early intervention for a 16 year old that turns to crime as a consequence of unaddressed needs
- A York University study showed that the real cost to society over the lifetime of an individual without appropriate early intervention, including benefits paid as opposed to tax revenue accrued after such intervention, could run to hundreds of thousands of pounds
- A reduction in Local Authority tribunal cases, 10% of which have related to SLCN over the last two years
- A reduction in bureaucracy and administration time of support workers and teaching staff
- Keeping children off the SEN register who do not need to be on it
There are campaigns being run by the RCSLT and the Communications Trust, but we need to do more – not only to raise awareness of SLCN issues, but also to enact the necessary changes which can provide our children with equitable services regardless of socio-economic factors, save resources in the future, and ensure no child is unable to fulfil their potential because of a communication difficulty.
Since the coalition government took office we’ve heard about difficult decisions, the need to achieve ‘more for less’, and focusing on outcomes for children even during financially challenging times. We feel we have the strategies that speak to all these policies, and what we need now is for those in power to put aside short-sighted thinking of only immediate savings, and listen to plans that will make a real and lasting impact both now and for many years to come – to our children, our society, and our economy as a whole.
We’ve helped literally hundreds of children this academic year alone in all kinds of schools and nurseries that would otherwise not have been able to access essential services. But there’s still so much further to go.
If you or someone you know is as passionate as we are about changing the way we think about and address SLCN, and making real changes in this area, then please get in touch with any ideas or things you’d like to see us doing, and help us bang the drum as loudly as possible until those in power can ignore it no longer.